Sunday, August 10, 2014

Field Accessors Considered Harmful

It's pretty well known these days that Haskell's field accessors are rather cumbersome syntactically and not composable. The lens abstraction that has gotten much more popular recently (thanks in part to Edward Kmett's lens package) solves these problems. But I recently ran into a bigger problem with field accessors that I had not thought about before. Consider the following scenario. You have a package with code something like this:

data Config = Config { configFieldA :: [Text] }

So your Config data structure gives your users getters and setters for field A (and any other fields you might have). Your users are happy and life is good. Then one day you decide to add a new feature and that feature requires expanding and restructuring Config. Now you have this:

This is a nice solution because your users get to keep the functionality over the portion of the Config that they are used to, and they still get the new functionality. But now there's a problem. You're still breaking them because configFieldA changed names to mconfigFieldA and now refers to the MConfig structure instead of Config. If this was not a data structure, you could preserve backwards compatibility by creating another function:

configFieldA = mconfigFieldA . configMC

But alas, that won't work here because configFieldA is not a normal function. It is a special field accessor generated by GHC and you know that your users are using it as a setter. It seems to me that we are at an impasse. It is completely impossible to deliver your new feature without breaking backwards compatibility somehow. No amount of deprecated cycles can ease the transition. The sad thing is that it seems like it should have been totally doable. Obviously there are some kinds of changes that understandably will break backwards compatibility. But this doesn't seem like one of them since it is an additive change. Yes, yes, I know...it's impossible to do this change without changing the type of the Config constructor, so that means that at least that function will break. But we should be able to minimize the breakage to the field accessor functions, and field accessors prevent us from doing that.

However, we could have avoided this problem. If we had a bit more foresight, we could have done this.

module Foo (mkConfig, configFieldA) where

data Config = Config { _configFieldA :: [Text] }

mkConfig :: [Text] -> Config
mkConfig = Config

configFieldA = lens _configFieldA (\c a -> c { _configFieldA = a })

This would allow us to avoid breaking backwards compatibility by continuing to export appropriate versions of these symbols. It would look something like this.

Note that the type signatures for mkConfig and configFieldA stay exactly the same. We weren't able to do this with field accessors because they are not composable. Lenses solve this problem for us because they are composable and we have complete control over their definition.

For quite some time now I have thought that I understood the advantage that lenses give you over field accessors. Discovering this added ability of lenses in helping us preserve backwards compatibility came as a pleasant surprise. I'll refrain from opining on how this should affect your development practices, but I think it makes the case for using lenses in your code a bit stronger than it was before.